Reviews tagged consumerism

Jonathan Safran Foer spoke about the issues in his most recent book Eating Animals to a packed house at the London School of Economics. I haven’t read the book yet, or either one of his other two titles Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, so I went bracing for a preachy rally full of vegetarian dogma.

In the past decade, America cinema has shown a change towards producing more women-centered movies, depicting independent unmarried women who seek out their own empowerment and gradually changing society’s view of single women. The women of Sex and the City, for instance, celebrate their singledom, showing it not to be the pitiable state it was once thought to be. While these women possess many feminist qualities, they also have attributes that separate them from the traditional ideals of feminism, a perspective which media studies scholar Hilary Radner labels neo-feminist in her current work, Neo-Feminist Cinema.

It took me a few days and about 100 pages to feel compelled to read This One Is Mine. Finally, I reached the point when the story could have gone in several directions and I was persuaded to turn each page with anticipation and wondering what would happen next. The story follows the lives of a handful of characters living in Los Angeles and enmeshed in its wealth and superficial façade.

These days, political analysts on both sides of the aisle are calling Pakistan a failed state. While the “most dangerous place in the world” does face profound political and social turmoil, such sweeping commentary fails to capture the more personal intricacies of the lives of ordinary people living inside the country’s borders. Pakistan is more than the Taliban fighters implementing Sharia law in the Swat Valley, and it’s more than the frequent bombings of embassies and hotels from Islamabad to Karachi.

To many, Hello Kitty is a mouthless cat in blue overalls who’s never spotted without her signature red bow, but to twenty-eight-year-old Chinese-American Fiona Yu, the feline is an embodiment of everything she hates and willing to kill for. Author Angela S.

Ad Nauseam: A Survivor's Guide to American Consumer Culture is an anthology of articles (plus some new material) from ‘90s ad-busting zine Stay Free!. Since I write a zine that deconstructs feminine hygiene advertising, I couldn’t have represented more of their target demographic if I’d tried.

Four viewings of Mitch McCabe’s documentary, Youth Knows No Pain, have me scratching my head. I am puzzled over exactly what McCabe was attempting to say with this film. Is Youth Knows No Pain a love letter to McCabe’s deceased plastic surgeon father or an obsession with mortality? Is this is a commentary on the consumerism and increasing narcissism of Western society? How about a meditation on how youth obsessed Americans are? An exploration of how ageism and sexism conflate to render women of a certain age invisible?

It’s absolutely astonishing to realize how much junk people in North America consume only to throw away. Most of it is from China. When I started to read Where Underpants Come From, I picked up various objects in my office—from the mechanical pencil I write with to my iPod—and I discovered that yes, everything had been made in China.

For years now, “Bible-thumping ideology” has clashed with a mainstream popular culture that seems to stand for everything fundamentalist Christians oppose. That is, however, until fundamentalist Christians discovered how they could harness the power of popular culture to sell their own messages of purity, penance, and prayer.
This is where Shirley Steinberg and Joe Kincheloe’s anthology Christotainment: Selling Jesus through Popular Culture begins.

Maybe the current economic meltdown the world-over has got me down, but I found Chris Ayres’ Death by Leisure: A Cautionary Tale a hard pill to swallow. Could it be that the time for cautionary tales has long passed? Every other fiction new release, it seems, touches upon environmental disaster, or endless war, or the disaster wrought by people living en masse beyond their means; this book touches upon all three.

Far as I can tell, there’s never been a consensus on Sex and the City’s feminist appeal. It shows intimate female relationships, but it’s heteronormative, white, and the characters often talk past each other. The women live (mostly) sexually liberated lives, but they’re nevertheless forever in search of the perfect man to fulfill their emotional needs.

Veteran writer and activist Chris Carlsson’s new book is nothing short of an urban working-class blueprint for change. Drawing on Marxist theory and powerfully deconstructing modern assumptions about class and work, Nowtopia presents fringe utopian ideals as well-reasoned, proactive solutions for how to authentically survive in our struggling society.

Live Earth, Al Gore’s spectacular series of concerts for the environment Earth, has been a magnet for mainstream media cynics, who point to amplifiers, lights and garbage as evidence that the whole thing was one big festival of hypocrisy. But for a member of the throng at Giants Stadium, at least, the atmosphere felt as political and optimistic as any show in memory.

Who hasn’t done it? Who hasn’t bought that extra cup of yogurt or that pink scarf that matches nothing in the closet just to show support for the breast cancer cause? Most women have seen what breast cancer can do in the lives of real women, whether we have endured it first-hand or watched a loved one struggle to survive. I have always felt that sweet inner glow after making a purchase if I knew that a small percentage of the proceeds would go to support breast cancer research. As a consumer, I felt that I was doing my part.

Living in a small studio apartment, I was excited to look through the home-help book, Making Room. The premise of the guide is to create new spaces in the home you have, instead of moving elsewhere or adding on extra rooms. With hopes set high, I eagerly dove into the book only to face-plant into glossy pages of disappointment.

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